“You can question his judgment,” Mansfield then reiterated to Dad, “but certainly you can see how you shouldn’t question his motive.”
Dad swiftly learned that if he didn’t put an opponent’s character front and center, he often could find a way to change minds or work out a compromise. No one walks out of a meeting when you say, “I don’t think you understand the ramifications of what you’re doing, how people won’t have access to things they need in their daily lives.” That prompts debate. But if you tell an opponent, “You’re just a mean-spirited jackass who’s clearly prejudiced against people with disabilities”—well, if you’re Jesse Helms, or anyone else for that matter, the conversation is over.
That lesson, long a foundational one for my dad and our family, is one that too many politicians today have failed to pick up. The result is the toxic atmosphere that blew the door wide open for somebody like Trump, who has since turned that lesson on its head. Trump’s motives can and should be questioned because, hell, most of the time he flat-out states them. And take my word, those motives ain’t pretty.
Having been around the Senate since I was three years old, I’ve watched the evolution of the people who’ve come into that chamber as conservative firebrands and later voted for liberal-backed issues not because they changed ideology, but because it was the right thing to do—like marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday, as Strom Thurmond eventually did, or supporting an extension of the Voting Rights Act, as did John Stennis, as staunch a Mississippi segregationist as there was.
Even Jesse Helms, who’d once declared AIDS “God’s punishment for homosexuals,” supported funding for AIDS relief in Africa during his last years in office.
Men and women can come to the Senate with one view of the world, but it’s difficult to stay in that office for any length of time and not be exposed to more diverse viewpoints and ways to arrive at judgments—at least, it was, before the fearmongering cult of Trumpism. It’s hard not to turn more empathetic. Most longtime political observers think those days of bipartisanship are gone for good. I hope it’s not true. Jeff Flake came to the Senate as Arizona’s right-wing counterpart to John McCain, and look at him now: a confirmed never-Trumper.
In the midst of the political storm that swirls around me, I try to stay optimistic. I’m not always successful. I’ll glance up at a TV in the middle of the day and see Lindsey Graham, a man from the opposite side of the aisle whom my dad and family have long considered a friend, morph into a Trump lapdog right before my eyes, slandering me and my father in the coldest, most cynical, most self-serving ways.
Beau and I didn’t grow up in Washington. We didn’t really hang out with other senators’ kids. Especially in those early days, we took the hour-and-a-half train ride with our dad from Wilmington to the Russell Building and back again, and that was pretty much it—the extent of our Washington upbringing.
Home was Delaware. That’s where politics formed us and made it possible for us to get to know the entire state like the backs of our hands. Delaware is often viewed as an irrelevant blip by many who aren’t from there, and for obvious reasons: With not quite a million residents, it’s the sixth smallest state in the country in population, and it’s the second-smallest state in area, behind only teeny Rhode Island. It’s easy to miss on a map if you’re not looking for it, squeezed as it is between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey.
Yet Delaware is an overlooked, underappreciated microcosm of America and a key contributor to my dad’s broad national appeal. The state’s history, culture, and politics reflect aspects associated with bigger distinct regions. It is at once a Northeastern suburb of Philadelphia; a cradle of Southern agriculture and race relations; a slice of the industrial Midwest; and a watery, port-centric belt like so many other areas up and down the mid-Atlantic.
The state’s North-South friction is longstanding and complex. Delaware was a slave state that never left the Union, with most of its citizenry taking up arms against the Confederacy. It was a crossroads for the Underground Railroad, with freed slaves outnumbering those still in bondage ten to one. Yet despite being the first of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the Constitution, it was the last one where slavery remained legal.
There’s a vibrant African American community in Wilmington, whose population of just over seventy thousand has one of the highest percentages of Black residents per capita in the country. Louis Redding, the first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, was part of the legal team that challenged school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. The city exploded in pent-up anger in the 1960s, and preachers in the city’s Black churches forged strong bonds during the civil rights movement with Black preachers in the Deep South.
Wilmington’s historically high voter turnout in 1972 was perhaps the biggest reason—along with my mother’s political instincts—that Dad won his Senate seat. There was the conviction in the Black community, which still holds true there and beyond, that “Joe is our guy.”
Though the differences might not be as stark as they once were, the state remains divided north and south, or upper and lower, by the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal. The upper portion views itself as more sophisticated, an adjunct of Philly and the Northeast corridor. It’s where 60 percent of all Fortune 500 companies are incorporated, due in large part to the state’s long-standing Court of Chancery, a special judicial body that rules on corporate law disputes expediently and without juries.
It’s also an area long dominated by the du Pont family, whose
